Conscientioustag:jmcolberg.com,2009-09-30:/weblog//42013-05-23T17:13:50ZJoerg Colberg's website about contemporary fine-art photography, featuring photographers, interviews, articles, and book and exhibition reviews.Movable Type 4.32-enRSS feeds shut downtag:jmcolberg.com,2013:/weblog//4.65252013-05-23T17:13:50Z2013-05-23T17:13:50ZJoerg Colberg
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A New Sitetag:jmcolberg.com,2013:/weblog//4.65252013-05-13T17:57:28Z2013-05-13T18:16:37ZJoerg Colberg

There is a new version of Conscientious, and you can find out all about it following this link (with its own, dedicated URL: cphmag.com, for Conscientious Photography Magazine). Starting immediately, this version of Conscientious is going to remain frozen. New content will now only appear at the new site (for reasons I am explaining here). Please update your bookmarks!

Let me get the following out of the way first: I find Peter Martens' American Testimony infuriating, for a variety of reasons, some having to do with what is shown in the frames, some with how it is shown. I felt I needed to get this off my chest so it wouldn't just sit there, like a tightly wound coil, waiting to release its energy. The photographs in the book were taken between roughly 1970 and 1990, mostly in New York, by Martens who died in 1992. The photographer had been working on compiling the book (plus another one, Few Loving Voices) up until his death.

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If American Testimony appears dated (I don't mean this in any other way that descriptive: speaking of a particular time) then that is in part due to the production, which instantly reminded me of the kinds of photography books that were so common in the past, with their matte papers and the rather heavy printing that often would not leave too much detail in the shadows (in this case, shadow detail is not a problem). Think a classic Weegee book, say, with Weegee being not such a bad reference as far as subject matter is concerned and how it is covered.

There is plenty of violence, or maybe more accurately its aftermath, and there is no shortage of desperate homeless people. There are corpses and Nazis, there are people strung up on drugs and cops. Yeah, right, American testimony. Well, anyway, if anything American Testimony speaks most strongly one a photographer's point of view, a consistent point of view (with, it needs to be said, a lot of sympathy for the cops that have to deal with all the violence) - imagine Weegee mixed with Jacob Holdt. You get Weegee's obsession with capturing the lurid, and you get Holdt's unflinching, unapologetic and completely one-sided European background.

I suppose there's really nothing wrong with that. You can convince yourself that those days are over now, and in many ways they are. New York City has been cleaned up by Republican mayors whose attitude towards all those too unfortunate to be able to make an easy living has been harsh (that's putting it mildly), and the electorate has had no problem with that, re-electing the current mayor, a billionaire, several times. Thus all that grime is gone, out of sight, and books like American Testimony put it back, into sight.

You may not like what you see, you may not enjoy the almost one-dimensional portrayal; but American Testimony also reminds us, indirectly, that the problems didn't just disappear magically. All those people also didn't disappear magically. Peter Martens was looking for them then, in his own - infuriating - way. Who is looking now?

According to the artist, Diane Meyer's Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten "is based on photographs taken at various points in my life and arranged by location. Sections of the images have been obscured through a layer of embroidered pixels sewn directly into the photograph. The embroidery deteriorates sections of the original photograph forming a new pixelated layer of the original scene. The project refers to the failures of photography in preserving experience and personal history as well as the means by which photographs become nostalgic objects that obscure objective understandings of the past."

A few years ago, Rimaldas Viksraitis won the Discovery Award at the Arles photography festival for his work in the Lithuanian countryside, depictions of scenes that for many critics and viewers brought to mind photographers like Boris Mikhailov or Richard Billingham. With work like Viksraitis' the topic of photography and exploitation is never that far. It's not clear to me how useful such discussions really are, especially since they usually omit the topic whether the photographer himself is not being exploited by the larger photography art world that discovered him and then parades him and his images around. I should also add that the photo art world might want to re-visit the topic of exploitation in light of the kinds of images people - willingly - put up online. (more)

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Thus I don't necessarily want to go there. That said, Viksraitis' photographs have left me slightly concerned, in much the same way as I have been concerned about, for example, the art world's celebration of Miroslav Tichy. Anyway, here's Naked (scroll down), a book that contains photographs of, well, naked people. Some of them might already be known, others might be previously unpublished. I'd like to throw another name into the reference mix here, to somewhat broaden the discussion about Viksraitis' work: Sergey Chilikov. Given so many of the photographs in Naked are obviously staged or constructed (at least they look that way), Chilikov's work might just add a different way to think about these photographs.

Much like Chilikov, Viksraitis often delights in what one could call a staged absurdity. I suppose one read that into more or less all of his photographs, and a critical reading is always just that, a critical reading. But the photographs in Naked appear to be somewhat more focused, with the element of documentary (in the loosest sense) mostly absent, so that the reading might come with less cross-cultural baggage. When I wrote "staged absurdity" I'm mostly thinking of a vodka-fueled, Eastern European magical realism, where the magical isn't quite so magical (it's more than just a tad mundane actually), and let's not even talk about realism.

But still... the whimsy might be very hung over, and the proto-/pre-Christian imagery might be rooted in a way less magical - and thus much scarier - paganism (at least from the point of view of someone with a US/European background), but approaching both Chilikov and Viksraitis from that angle appears to offer an opening for, well, a different approach, one that somehow circumvents all the markers that make the reading of the work so conveniently simple.

There then would be my reading of this work, which, I reckon, might get rejected by both those who went gaga over Viksraitis before, and by those who would want to keep the term for where it's usually used: This is magical realism. The magic might not look so magical, and the realism might only be all too real, but then you can't always get what you want.

It appears that about every ten years (give or take a few) a photobook manages to capture the imagination of large numbers of photographers, resulting in an unavoidable flurry to emulate if not imitate. Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi provided this "gold standard" of photobooks until Christian Patterson's Redheaded Peckerwood came around (pardon the hyperbole, you can use the term "marker" instead).

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I have the feeling that despite the explosion of photographers traveling the land with their view cameras and lists, Mississippi was a boon for educators, since a whole generation of students had to learn how to work precisely and carefully with those large cameras. With Peckerwood, I already notice students throwing all caution overboard, aiming for hundreds of different image sizes all over the page, with different styles of pictures thrown in for good measure.

Ironically, while in the past I found myself wanting photographers to be less conservative, my task now is to tell photographers to be more conservative, since lots of different sizes and styles produces a hot mess unless it's done very, very well.

Mississippi and Peckerwood have (so far) seen their third edition each, a feat that is rare for the vast majority of all photobooks. As a consequence, copies of the books are easy to come by, and they are affordable. Actually, I wrote this before looking Mississippi up - I guess it's not true any longer. Regardless, in both cases, the artists decided to change the second and third editions. In Soth's case, the books ended up having different covers.

In Patterson's case, other changes were made. The second edition featured an expanded booklet (the essays in the book come in a separate booklet). In addition, the printing itself was changed, to often result in somewhat more contrasty images (this is also true for the cover). The third edition introduced more changes, to the booklet (again) as well as the main book itself, plus there's a reproduction postcard that comes with the package. For the third edition, Patterson added images to the main book, leaving the teacher in me wondering which version I'll now show my students when talking about the book.

Conceptually, an evolving book is interesting for a variety of reasons, and it is equally problematic I think. If I compare my first and third edition, what does the presence of new images tell me as far as the "story" is concerned? The addition of new images does change the story, and even if it is ever so slightly.

I don't want to pretend I even have a clue what this all means, because I am equally attracted to the idea of the evolving photobook as I am opposed to it. For a start, the evolving photobook would not work for every book. In the past, I've considered the kinds of expanded re-issues that are so common of classic photobooks like the expanded re-issues of jazz albums - you listen to the "cutting-room floor" stuff, and you realize why it was left out in the first place. But a book like Redheaded Peckerwood does not operate like, say, Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places, so the jazz analogy doesn't apply (lest the "gotcha" crowd thinks they got something here: I actually like the recent edition of Shore's book, I'm going to stay shtum about re-releases I don't like).

There clearly is an opportunity for photographers to think about this issue here, especially in light of some photobooks selling out quickly. Cristina De Middel's widely lauded Afronauts is sold out, which is more than just unfortunate given it still is being talked about so widely. Collectors be damned, this just screams for a second edition! (And I'm not talking about an app for the iPhone/iPad) The business/collecting angle aside, the main question is whether re-issues or second editions should be changed/modified or not, what might be gained from doing that. In other words, to what extent can photobooks be if not living entities then at least evolving entities?

The changes in the editions of Redheaded Peckerwood are small enough to argue for either static or evolving photobooks. As I noted I haven't made up my mind, even though I have started to lean in one direction, and I might talk about that at some other time.

The release of smaller, purely photo-centric books, has been a part of The Sochi Project for the past years now. The beauty of these smaller books is that they allow for a bit more playfulness in an otherwise often very heavy series of publications. The latest addition, Kiev, is no exception. Rob Hornstra was given a Kiev 6C medium-format SLR camera, a veritable beast of a camera, which, as it happens, I owned once myself. When they work, which often means if they work, these cameras are pretty amazing. You'll grow a muscle or two (they're huge and heavy), and you'll smell Soviet industrial smells you had no idea they even existed. (more)

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One of the tests to determine whether you're a real photographer or not is whether you can get truly excited over "vintage" camera gear (just kidding). Rob apparently passed the test easily, putting the Kiev to good use before realizing that it might be broken, which, inevitably, it was. Kiev contains the results of this exploration of Sochi with Soviet camera gear, pictures that do look a bit more touristy than his usual work. As he notes in the short text that comes with the book "I photographed things that I had never seen through the lens of my Mamiya."

The book itself is a nifty production. Printed on a card stock, it's an origami-style book: The book essentially consists of one big sheet of card board, whose two sides were printed on. The sheet was then cut and folded to produce an almost accordion-style book (there are two hinges that run at the bottom of the book). If you unfold the book you get a poster on one side. In the very center of the book, a single sheet of paper is stapled in, with a little text - quite a neat way to make a very simple and effective book.

Taking the seriousness out of some of their publications has allowed The Sochi Project to experiment with the format photobook and to explore what can be done. This kind of playfulness is very common in the area of DYI publishing/zines, but it hasn't made it beyond that niche all that much. Kiev thus is a timely reminder that there are all kinds of photobooks, and some can be made in fairly simple, yet effective and fun ways. Kudos to The Sochi Project for pushing the boundaries wherever they fall!

Kiev; photographs and short text by Rob Hornstra; cardboard fold-out book in a photo-illustrated wrapper; The Sochi Project; 2012

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Review: After the Threshold by Sandi Haber Fifieldtag:jmcolberg.com,2013:/weblog//4.65062013-04-25T17:11:52Z2013-04-25T06:51:52ZJoerg Colberg

Photography is such a peculiar form of art. It's instantaneous in ways that other art forms are not. You see a photograph, and it's right there, impressing itself immediately into your brain, into the unconscious parts first and then, after a little delay, into the conscious areas. As a result, it operates in very different ways than, say, music or video, photography's closest cousin. Photography's immediacy naturally leads to all kinds of assumptions about its power, many (most?) of which turn out to be wrong.

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For example, we want to believe that seeing images of horrible abuse will make such future horrible abuse impossible, but that's not the case. Our consciousness, after all, will find ways to argue its way around our subconsciousness (our consciousness works much like the US Senate with its combination of meekness and deeply entrenched vested interests). But the interesting thing about photography is that it retains its power, provided it does not overplay its hand.

Photography's immediacy allows it to operate in pairs, triplets, or even larger groups. The larger the group, the trickier it gets - after all, the human brain does require a small amount of time to take in a single image. But that amount of time is small compared with how long it takes to take in a video, or listen to just enough of a piece of music to be moved by it. Two photographs next to each other thus manage to "speak" in ways that two videos or pieces of music never could. Use three of four photographs, and you get a little sequence that almost operates like a melody, a little line of music that hints at something larger, but that (potentially) triggers a reaction that results from something beyond the individual notes.

I had to think of this when looking through Sandi Haber Fifield's After the Threshold, a book in which each spread consists of groups of mostly four, occasionally three photographs, the the same size, presented in a row. It's a book of musical chords, essentially, done using photographs. Photographs aren't necessarily the equivalent of notes in music, but the combination of three or four photographs, as presented in this book, effectively turns each group of pictures into a chord. Just like in music, chords come in all kinds of flavours, and they do different things.

The notes can also be played in unison or arpeggio style, one after the other. The interesting thing about After the Threshold is that you end up with both. Some sequences require a reading, from left to right, others appear to operate more like a group of photographs that all speak at the same time. Not each of the groups works equally well for me; some seem a tad simplistic (to the point of being designy). But the more interesting groups - the bulk of the book - create these little stories or moods that linger and carry a mood, much like a chord. I was almost surprised how well that worked.

Thus After the Threshold provides a great example of part of photography's spectrum, sitting somewhere between the single image and the long, elegant sequence of many pictures. And the book implicitly tells us something about how photographs work, or maybe how what many might consider as photography's weakness - the isolated moment - might be transformed into a strength.

In Apres Strand, Bertrand Carriere follows the trails of Paul Strand who in 1929 and 1936 visited the Gaspé Peninsula, which resulted in Strand understanding what he called "the essential character of a place." (more information [in English] here)

About her series under the surveillance of ancient animals photographer Maria Oliveira wrote me: "I am following the lives of three women, mother, daughter and sister in law, who live together and alone. With this project, I want to explore this relationship between women, the links that unite them despite the difficulty.
And there is also this link to Earth, to Nature. Life has a rhythm, the crops cycle, the seasons. Here, there is no hurry, there's time for the people and for the silence. These three women together turned to Earth as something primordial and eternal."

Julia Borissova's The Farther Shore is a recent addition to the growing number of photobooks looking at traces of the past by using archival materials (photographs and other ephemera) and original photography. As much as this has become a trend, one that I suspect we all will become a bit tired of in not too much time, in this particular case, the result is engaging and very interesting. (more)

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Borissova set out to look at towns and villages partially or fully flooded during the 1930s, when Stalin set out to jump start the Soviet economy with gigantic projects, not all of them necessarily particuarly useful, and many of them relying on vast amounts of Gulag slave labour. The book speaks of "800 villages and towns, 3 cities, 5 monasteries, hundreds of churches and old cemeteries." There is little doubt that the Soviets did not consider the loss of any of the churches or monasteries a loss; and with people mostly being treated as expendable even when they were not part of the Gulag system, one can't escape the feeling that none of the settlements submerged were considered one, either.

The Farther Shore slowly peels back the various layers of the past, making us look at what is still there and - indirectly - what is gone. Inevitably, those left behind or those growing up in the changed environment will have to do with what is left, the latter often (usually?) oblivious to what environment they find themselves in. Nostalgia for the past, just like the past itself, to a large extent is a construct. We remember what we can and want to remember, and we pine for what we can and want to pine for.

Self-published in a small edition, Borissova's book reached me from Russia. Here then is one of the beauties of today's photobook boom, which to a large extent is fueled by the internet and its way of allowing for connections to be made: Stories from far away can be told and brought to one's door step, without requiring the need of a major publisher. All it takes is an artist willing and able to make a book, and to allow for that little piece of art to sail off into the world - a piece of art not part of the electronically floating world, but a real thing, to be held and enjoyed.

"More film has probably been exposed on naked and semi-naked women than on any other subject in photography's history." write Gerry Badger and Martin Parr in The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 (p. 226). As a matter of fact, there is a whole meta-book dedicated specifically to such photobooks, Alessandro Bertolotti's Books of Nudes, which offers a very unique and interesting view of not just photography of the nude itself, but also - and especially - the societies it is embedded in (allowing the reader to, for example, connect the mass movements around public nudity prevalent in 1920s Germany with, say, Leni Riefenstahl's imagery of Olympic athletes - and much more). Nadav Kander's Bodies: 6 Women, 1 Man probably is not the latest addition to this type of photobook (there must be countless appearing every week), but a very recent one.

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As the title indicates, Kander worked with seven model, six of them women, plus one man. They each were photographed more or less isolated against a mostly black background (there are a few photographs using a white one, and one set features a few lines in the background that are used to roughly delineate a space). They all also appear to be using body makeup - some more than others, which has the effect of isolating their bodies and poses even further.

The resulting photographs clearly reference not just the history of photography - in various cases, Irving Penn's Nudes come to mind, as do some of Ryan McGinley's b/w studio nudes. There also is the history of the art nude in general, with possibly British painters such as Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon providing other reference points. Art is never made in perfect isolation.

In an interview at the end of the book, Kander speaks of photographic nudes he aspires to: "Kertesz, Muybridge, Friedlander, the most honest nudes I have ever seen, and Brandt," noting he likes them for their lack of eroticism. Why or how eroticism would result in something possibly less honest or in something that was less preferable I don't know. I remember Thomas Ruff speaking about pornographic images found online as the most honest (and most democratic) nudes, and that way we would would have two very different approaches to the same subject matter.

I feel that Kander has maybe taken the effect a little bit too far. These are isolated bodies, photographed very beautifully, yet maybe too beautifully in an aesthetic sense. In much the same way, the presentation in the book itself is slightly too careful - there is an almost blank spread in between each of the spreads showing a photograph (or occasionally two). Many of the images already carry considerable weight, and the presentation adds to that.

It's almost as if the viewer is not supposed to enjoy the photographs of naked bodies in the wrong way, whatever that might be, eroticism possibly being the main "danger". The nude body per se is not erotic, however and photographs of it aren't either. And even if they were for some, well... wouldn't that be just fine?

That said, Nadav Kander is to be applauded for going where many have gone before: What other type of photography would be harder to do than the one covered by so many photographers before, a type of photography that is also one of the most democratic one (without being fully acknowledged as that)? There are many wonderful photographs in this book of nudes, executed and seen perfectly, bringing the artist's sensibilities to this type of photography.

"In this project I refer to the subject of the first wave of Russian emigration in 1920's. Combining old photos and flower petals I destroy the original images of people in the photos and make them anonymous. I reflect on how with the lapse of time some details are erased from our memory and every time we recall something from the past, we construct another image replacing some parts by new ones." - Julia Borissova about Running to the Edge

"Be Good is a work about underage married Roma teenagers in Romania, their traditions and rituals of the wedding (night), the importance of virginity and the burden of proof. It shows portraits of married couples with a focus on appearing as individuals and also some teenagers that grew up in this tradition, along with symbolic and metaphoric still lives of flowers and interiors like their marital bedrooms." - Maria Sturm

Jakub Skokan and Martin Tuma's Zoolandscape "records forms of artificially constructed biotopes and landscape scenes of the environment of European zoological gardens. Zoological landscapes have a specific role. Their purpose is to simulate biotopes of presented animals. The animals' environment is made artificially out of imitating materials or is reconstructed from original living products of nature. The landscape is simplified, systematized and idealized. It is adjusted to meet the aesthetic demands of a viewer and just like a stage in a theater it aims to present the animal - the performer - in the most ideal way." (quoted from the project information)